John Phokas

Also known as Ioannes Phokas, John Phocas

Byzantine Greek pilgrim — formerly a soldier in the campaigns of Manuel I Komnenos, later a monk on Patmos — whose Ekphrasis is the principal twelfth-century Greek description of the Latin kingdom on the eve of Hattin.

John Phokas was a subject of the Byzantine Empire who had served as a soldier in the eastern campaigns of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos — accompanying the imperial army to the sea off Attaleia in 1166 — and who, in later life, retired to the monastery of St John on the island of Patmos, where his father had earlier become a monk. He undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land about 1185, two years before Hattin, and recorded it in a short Greek text known as the Ekphrasis or 'Concise Description'.

The Ekphrasis is the only sustained twelfth-century Greek account of pilgrimage to a Holy Land governed by Latins. Phokas describes the route from Antioch southwards down the coast — Latakia, Tortosa, Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre — into Galilee and Jerusalem, naming the great Crusader fortresses along the way and pausing for sympathetic descriptions of the Greek-rite monasteries (Mar Sabas, the Cave of the Annunciation at Nazareth) that had survived under Frankish lordship.

His tone is that of a working Byzantine soldier-monk: short on doctrinal grievance and long on practical observation. The text gives us Greek eyes on the Latin kingdom in the last years before the catastrophe and is, alongside Anna Komnene's Alexiad and the Madaba Map, one of the basic Greek sources for the medieval geography of the Holy Land.

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